Culture
The Courage to Imagine Other Failures 4 minutes read.
This is a powerful mindset when thinking about risk management and how to prioritize it: "By prioritizing doing preventative work from recent incidents, we are implicitly assuming that a recent incident is the one most likely to bite us again in the future. It’s important to remember that this is an illusion: we feel like the follow-up work is the most important thing we can do for reliability because we have a visceral sense of the incident we just went through. It’s much more real to us than a hypothetical, never-happened-before future incident. Unfortunately, we only have a finite amount of resources to spend on reliability work, and our memory of the recent incident does not mean that the follow-up work is the reliability work which will provide the highest return on investment."
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Dependencies in Fast(er) Growing Companies 6 minutes read.
I highly recommend reading both parts of John Cutler's post and waiting for part 3 for some solutions. A good exercise is to think about these solutions while understanding that "There are managing dependencies and managing the context around dependencies" and "The challenge of managing dependencies is a) often about surrounding context, and b) efforts to manage dependencies can make things worse." So the challenge you deal with is how do you reduce friction and complexity effectively as it's so easy to make things worse.
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We Invested 10% to Pay Back Tech Debt; Here's What Happened 6 minutes read.
The practice of working on Tech Debt together (Friday every two weeks) as a team is a wonderful takeaway from this post by Alex Ewerlof: "Engineers looked forward to the Tech Debt Friday. The team would happily remind management that this day cannot (under any circumstances) be planned for regular feature/bugfix work. Although we fixed some bugs along the way, this was primarily an investment to make future feature development cheaper while improving the maintainability and reliability."
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